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The presentation of the new Yearbook of Women’s History entitled Gender and Activism. Women’s Voices in Political Debates (guest editor Mieke Aerts) will be integrated with the annual meeting of the VVG and award of the Johanna Naber-Prize on Friday April 15th (at Atria, Vijzelstraat 20, Amsterdam)! Do come!

In nearly all societies gender has been and continues to be central in defining roles and responsibilities around food production, manufacturing, provisioning, eating, and disposal. Food–related work and practices along with context and cultures serve to construct and reinforce identities and social structures. At the same time, the gendered practices around food are complex and often contradictory. Much of the literature on gender and food explores these complexities and contradictions but continues to make use of dichotomies (i.e., rural/urban; local/global; producer/consumer; large-scale/small-scale; man/woman; past/future) that are increasingly less suited to critical analyses of the fluidity of experiences and science and thus limit our ability to better understand relationships between food and gender.

This raises questions about what then takes place in the in-between spaces, i.e. where producers are also consumers; where gender roles and norms are challenged; where local custom challenges global standards? What concepts, categories, discoveries, and theories can help expand our understanding of gender when it comes to food, and of food when it comes to gender?

The 2016 Yearbook of Women’s History will explore these questions by following food-related practices across time and space from ‘seed to waste’. Papers will consider gendered practices across the food production cycle across the globe from various disciplinary perspective and intersection points (i.e., age, race, sexuality, class) so as to uncover new insights into the impacts, implications and shifting relations of gender across food system, including practices undertaken in and across:

Food growing;

Processing;

Selling;

Buying;

Cooking;

Serving/service;

Eating;

Cleaning;

The deeply interdisciplinary special issue will bring together a diverse collection of innovative and accessible articles. In exploring the questions raised above, we encourage authors to interrogate traditional categories, dichotomies, and binaries and contribute to the advancement of understanding of the dynamics and relationships between gender and food. Above all, we are interested in papers that go beyond questions about women and food to explore changing understandings and boundaries at the intersection of food and gender across time and space.

We encourage authors of all disciplines and locations to submit abstracts (maximum 300 words) before 20 February 2016 to Evelien Walhout (editorial secretary): e.walhout@let.ru.nl

Short Bios of Guest Editors

Bettina Bock is Associate Professor in Rural Sociology at Wageningen University (The Netherlands). She is the editor in chief of Sociologia Ruralis. She holds a PhD in rural sociology based on a study of gender and rural development policy and practice defended in 2004. Her research projects include rural development and social innovation, rural gender relations, as well as sustainable food consumption and production.

Originally from Canada, Jessica Duncan is Assistant Professor in Rural Sociology at Wageningen University (The Netherlands). She is an Associate Editor of the journal Food Security and co-chair of the Food Policy and Governance Research Network of the European Consortium for Political Research. She holds a PhD in Food Policy from City University London. Her research areas include: food policy; food security; global governance; social practices; gender; and participation.

This yearbook attends to ways in which women were active to question rights for sex and gender related issues in the political arena. Covering a diverse range of cultures and political situations the Yearbook will discuss the ambiguous messages of FEMEN in Ukraine and France; the work of female mukhtars in Turkish local politics; the debate over child marriage in late colonial India; and the feminist opposition to abortion in the United States of America. An interview with women activists will give an inside perspective on Egypt and Tunisia, while debates in a more distant include the controversy between socialists and feminists over women workers in the Netherlands, and the representation of motherhood, domestic display, and democracy in a 1948 exhibition in the Netherlands. Triggered by a colour portrait of a prominent Dutch feminist brings a re-evaluation of her achievements, and a visual section will discuss the representation of women in politics by way of political posters.

Call for papers for the Yearbook of Women’s History (2015) – Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis

In the year of the Arab Spring, UN Secretary Ban Ki-Moon remarked in his opening address to a UN Roundtable on Gender Equality and Democracy: “It is no coincidence that the revolutionary fervor sweeping North Africa and the Middle East began in Tunisia – and that women played such a role. Tunisia was among the first Arab countries to grant women the right to vote, in the late 1950s. Tunisian women have also made important gains in the professions and parliament. Girls growing up with such role models quite naturally expect to follow suit.” He went on to conclude: “While women’s political participation improves democracy, the reverse is also true: democracy is an incubator for gender equality” (UN Roundtable, 4 May 2011). Such a strong public statement suggesting a self-evident connection between women’s empowerment and democratic politics may be read as an auspicious indication of ways in which feminist aspirations have become acknowledged in high places. However, it also raises questions. Most importantly: does every kind of women’s activism really automatically improve democracy? The 2015 Yearbook of Women’s History will devote itself to this issue.

Of the many conceptual issues meriting exploration in depth, there are two we want to foreground. First, there is the issue of how to evaluate the tensions in the democratic content of women’s activism. The growing literature on the entanglement of gender with other forms of social inequality, and the rise of concepts such as “intersectionality”, have given us many insightful studies on the contradictions complicating women’s participation in anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles. While the older literature on women’s activism inside labor organizations and left-wing politics had already introduced awareness of the historical tensions between feminism and socialism, political developments in Europe after 1989 produced renewed interest in this topic (e.g. Kolinsky and Nickel 2003). Despite all this, the historiography of women’s activism as it stands still shows a certain bias – in focusing mainly on “progressive” movements and assuming a positive connection between feminism and left-wing politics, or between women’s activism and democracy. But as the heated debates on women in Nazi Germany after Claudia Koonz’s Mothers in the Fatherland (1988) have made clear, the possibility of women being “rebels against democracy” should also be considered seriously. For this Yearbook we therefore welcome not only studies of women in labour unions and suffrage struggles, but also research on right-wing women activists, the complex political message of fundamentalist women, or groups like Femen and Pussy Riot.

The second issue concerns the democratic forms of women’s activism. While much has been written about early women’s activism in Europe and the United States (e.g. Scott 1996, Applewhite and Levy 1990, Everard 2001, Zagarri 2007), as well as the organizing of women in the widely-studied nineteenth and twentieth centuries (e.g. Offen 2000, 2010, Yearbook 1984, 1985, 1991, 2000, 2009), we know far less about the actual practice of organizing. In this respect most studies of women’s organizing have remained too close to the traditional concerns of political history, which have tended to favor the “why” over the “how”. As a possible exception the recent work of Linda Gordon (2012) on feminism and leadership in participatory democracy comes to mind. We would like to see contributions in the same vein, which would pay careful attention to the ways in which various organizational practices invent and recreate certain forms of the political, possibly also excluding or opposing other such forms, or even presenting themselves as anti- or a-political. We are particularly interested in approaches that try to move beyond dichotomous interpretative frames, such as male versus female styles, utopian versus realistic politics, expressive versus instrumental politics, or top-down versus bottom-up leadership styles. By tackling such issues, the study of women activists and their organizing practices could contribute not only to a more precise understanding of what is often very loosely termed the “empowerment of women”, but also to a broader and more historically grounded understanding of “democracy”.

For more information please send an email to Mieke Aerts (guest editor): m.aerts@wxs.nl